AI makes its case against the ‘business-savvy CIO’

Once upon a time, there were actual arguments as to whether CIOs should be business people, not technology people. With any luck, these arguments were stomped out back here: “The case against the ‘business-savvy CIO’” — which drove the arguments for this false dichotomy into the ground back in 2018.

Some complications have arisen in the near decade since, so I’m afraid we need to revisit the subject — especially as the most recent of this has made the drumbeat for business-savvy CIOs that much louder.

One source of this need was the case of the dreaded Digital adjectival abuse, also known as “Digital as a Noun.”

Digital was a big deal back in the pre-COVID era. It matters here because for Digital to work, business leaders needed to be technologists, not just business people.

As business leaders became better technologists, CIOs needed to keep up on the business potential for the various Digital technologies their business leader friends were suddenly asking for.

Another source of confusion was COVID itself, and the discovery it led to on the part of those business executives not already convinced that the entire business ran on IT, and that any area that still relied on manual processes should be presumed incompetent. Rather than insisting on a full-blown ROI to justify automating a function, those relying on manual methods were (or should have been) asked to justify this choice.

AI changes the equation

But as tendentious or tectonic as those shifts might have seemed at the time, AI is raising the now-what-do-I-do? equation to new heights.

That’s because CIOs are now being given a new set of alternatives:

• Whether they want to be business people after all;
• Whether they should become or remain classical business/technologists;
• Or, should they set their sights on becoming AI business/technologists.

You might have noticed an emerging trend in IT: The proliferation of articles about AI whose content even many tech-savvy CIOs can’t make heads or tails of.

And no, the problem isn’t that their texts include a bunch of unfamiliar buzzwords.

Much of the offending content is rooted in unfamiliar concepts, not vocabulary changes.

Or, even more frustrating, the puzzlement sometimes lies in familiar buzzwords whose meaning has changed and become obscure.

So never mind whether CIOs should be business people or technologists. A more challenging question is whether CIOs should be business people, classically tech-savvy people, or AI/tech-savvy people.

Or some combination of those alternatives.

But wait, there’s a whole other level we need to dig through. That’s because this collection of confusing questions isn’t the starting point. It’s because, as CIO, the questions that matter aren’t about how the CIO engages with the rest of the company as an executive.

It’s how the CIO engages as the company’s highest-level business analyst.

The CIO’s changing roles and directives

With classical IT organizational architectures, a CIO could make sense of all of IT’s slices, dices, and levels, how the pieces fit together to make the business more effective, and how adding and rearranging the pieces could help make the business more effective and competitive.

In the good ol’ days, that is, CIOs could succeed wearing their business analyst haberdashery without having to give up their executive function.

Read the average opinion piece on how AI affects the CIO’s role and you’ll get the same tired back-office-to-front-office recommendations we waded through when Digital was king. But AI isn’t what’s driving that shift, if it even is a shift.

No, here’s what I think the average CIO is in for:

• Elevating the business analyst: CIOs need to be smart about AI, but aren’t in a position to make themselves business-analyst-smart about AI. So it’s up to the CIO to give IT’s best business analysts assignments that will make them AI- smart, and to schedule regular debriefings to help the CIO become smart enough.
• Become architect-level smart about AI: CIOs should build a capability-level view of AI, collaborating with the whole IT department to gain a realistic understanding of what high-level business capabilities AI does and could bring to the business party.
• Adopt the CSO hat on the company’s behalf: No, notchief security officer. Chief skepticism officer: What the company needs the CIO to become is someone able to see through the hype and blather that sets implementation traps and leads to seductive but unachievable transformation programs.

Why this matters more than you might think

Once upon a time, one of the hallmarks of well-built IT was simplicity. IT professionals designed and engineered systems they and their colleagues could understand because the systems were designed to be graspable.

Among the many changes AI is bringing to the fore is that AIs don’t need the same level of simplicity, and we can anticipate that AIs won’t be instructed to make their designs human-graspable either.

We already have too many applications in the IT portfolio that are the only repositories of business logic the company has — the developers and business analysts who supported this business logic retired long ago.

That was the case when simplicity was a design goal.